Patriot Viper VP4300 PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD Review

The drive is similar to other M.2 drives on the market.  It measures 3.15” long making it a standard length for M.2 SSDs and not much larger than a stick of gum.

Due to the 2TB capacity of our review unit you will find SSD chips on both sides of the PCB.

Unlike most M.2 drives on the market the Patriot Viper VP4300 comes with options for cooling the drive.  Most NVMe drives operate best when their controller chip is cooled.  This doesn’t need to be an active cooler but something to remove excess heat allowing the drive time to heat up and cool down under normal operation.

You only need to worry about this when the drive is under heavy load, and by heavy we are talking about large sustained file transfers similar to moving data between drives or across the network.  Under normal operation and even in games the drive will remain rather cool.

Given that storage devices should remain stable over their entire lifetime it is important to maintain respectable temperatures as it will also offer the highest performance.  Most motherboards feature onboard cooling solutions for NVMe drives by integrating cooling into the VRM and PCH heatsinks.   On older systems these coolers are often non-existent ore are from extremely thin metal making them inadequate for sustained loads.

Patriot has included two thermal solutions to combat this including a very decorative aluminum heatsink complete with a thermal pad.  This solution works well for mainstream systems however, if you require better thermals, you can also include the Graphene thermal pad which can offer better thermal performance lowering load temperatures and ensuring long drive life.

The drive is bare from the factory with the assumption that your motherboard will have an available cooling solution.  That allows the user the option to install either of the thermal solutions as needed to match their thermal needs.

For this review I used the included heatsink on the EVGA Z590 Dark motherboard and found it to be adequate for any load I subjected to the Viper VP4300.